Spring! (doyng doyng doyng)

Our best effort at a lazy Sunday

Because we didn’t sleep an awful lot at Susan’s on Friday night (late night, cold restless dog, early start to get up the Hill and – as it turns out, rather futilely – Teesyproof the container ahead of our visit to Bonorong), we decided that Saturday to Sunday would be a day for sleeping in.  So that’s what we did.  We were barely out of bed and totally still in jarmies when neighbour Matt showed up with a stainless steel saucepan / steamer combo, a compressor, a bottle of beer and a Plan.

It took a while to get the plan happening, but here’s a selection of what we did, a lot of which we had enormous help with from Matt:

* Unloaded from the ute: the Bonorong poo (and some horse poo we picked up on the road to Hobart for 50c a bag ) and the WELDER we had also picked up along the way – not as impulse a purchase as it sounds, we’d been mulling over some previously acquired info for a couple of weeks before we took the plunge.

* knocked down the entirely nonsensical front wall of the middle shed – the one inside the actual shed door, made of a wooden frame with various polystyrene signs nailed to it.  The signs will be excellent as makeshift insulation between the container ceiling and the colorbond roof.

* removed and reorganised about 10 tonnes of crap, mostly from the big shed (to the left of the middle shed, mostly full of caravan, which in turn is to the left of the container)

* reinflated the tyres of the van using the compressor that Matt had brought.

* Installed the ute’s towball, hooked the caravan up to it and towed the bloody nuisance thing out of the middle shed.  It’s now parked conveniently for Matt to collect at his leisure – he mentioned plans to make it into guest quarters for his brother, who’s planning a visit sometime soon.  We couldn’t be more pleased, and Matt seems fairly pleased and all.

* installed five rather excellent and very sturdy shelves in the middle shed. The materials for this were scrounged from sheds and scrap metal piles all over the joint – Adam, the previous owner, seems to have collected about sixteen shops’ worth of shop fittings, a few of which could quite handily get turned into our new storage area.  What with the new, swinging door, a second access point in the form of the large middle shed door, the shelves, and the fact that the space is now trebledin all dimensions, that space is a thousand times pleasanter and more useful, and we are extremely pleased with ourselves.  Having got to a relatively late start, it was getting dark by the time we were doing shelving, but because we were running the genny for power tools anyway, we were able to press into service one of the floodlights that Adam left behind – worked a treat!

Volunteering @ St James’s (finally!)

Today we were up bright and early to a beautiful sunny day, and FINALLY made it to a volunteering session at the Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden at St James’s primary school in Cygnet.  It was a fun, challenging half-day of (supervising) watering, weeding, spraying seaweed solution (and a smattering of garlic spray because of an invasion of aphids), checking the worm farm, planting, repotting seedlings, starting two sprout cultures, etc etc.  Teesy came along and behaved herself beautifully in the face of a press of dozens of pre-teen boys and girls, even warming to Kate and Cameron’s lovely chocolate staffy/kelpie bitch (Kte and Cameron were also first-time volunteers today, and almost as new in the region as us!).  It was hard but very satifying work, and naturally Chloe struck up a conversation with Nicky, the volunteer co-ordinator, Roy the Kitchen co-ordinator, and Theresa, another sustainability bod and long-time volunteer with the program, about building them a cob pizza oven – using hyperadobe techniques and with us volunteering OzEarth’s time and expertise.  The brainstorming session branched into talk of adjacent cob benches, and getting the children involved in designing and realising mosaics for those and the outside of the oven.

Now, the oven is something St James’s garden / kitchen team has been looking into for a while and they may have other avenues lined up, so it’s not by any means a done deal, but we do hope that we end up being the ones to take on the project: it would be incredibly exciting if we could get the whole school community, and actually the Cygnet community in general, involved in the whole process.

New arrivals

While doing the “multiple outputs” thing of going to the laundrette and the post office (insanely ambitious seed order has been SENT!) Susan came to find us in order to tell us that our worms have arrived.  We ordered two sorts: earthworms and composting worms. 2000 of each (in egg form).

Other prospective new arrivals: in a Freecycle-induced rush of blood to the head, we are about to become the proud mothers of five bantams: three roosters and two hens.  We think we’ll offer one of the roosters to John down the Hill, because he recently lost his magnificent rooster and seems quite sad (as does his remaining hen, who followed us around pathetically the last time I was there to visit); so we should end up with at least two of each.  It will be SUCH a homecoming to finally have chooks again!

Pooooooooooo, fixing the road, and gathering soil

We spent this afternoon making homes for the worms. We had already (on that not-so-lazy Sunday in fact) retrieved a bath from the big shed and put it up on blocks to prepare for the composting worms, and have pressed an old fridge into service for the Earthworms (who apparently are sensitive to cold when they’re wee, so we thought an insulated space would be good).

Making bedding and food for our new critters was vastly aided by the timely acquisition of previously mentioned horse poo and Bonorong RooPoo.  We also used the woody last of the Huonville Trailerload of compost which we picked up three weeks ago when we planted the fruit trees, and a fair portion of a bale of hay very kindly donated by Paulette from near the base of the Hill.

For the earthworms, of course, we also needed, well, earth.  Our soil at the top of the Hill here is, presently, very compacted, very clay-heavy, with a fine to non-existent layer of topsoil and a LOT of stones, ranging in size from gravel to something far heavier than Chloe and I can lift between us.

We decided to try and kill two birds with one stone by going down to the most scarily rutted bit of our road, carving a few channels in it, letting the water run out as much as possible, and putting some of the excess earth in some bags to take back up.  It seems to have gone well – our digging work was accompanied by the babbling of temporary brooks as the water drained away.  The soil we got is lovely, and even had some already-resident earthworms – a welcome addition!

So as of this evening, the worms-to-be are all safely ensconced, and we hope they’re warm enough – there’s very little wind tonight and the stars look so close that you could touch one if you got onto your tiptoes – What I’m coming to read as sufficient conditions for a nippy sort of night.

With the rest of the poo and another chunk of hay, we took the opportunity to top-dress our valiant little fruit trees, some of which are starting to leaf up marvellously (the lemon tree even seems to be trying to bloom, which is amazing!).  Each of our possum-proof cages now has a generous berm of poo and a mulch of straw.  We hope that this will kickstart soil-building around the trees, and that the mulch will help to retain moisture at their roots.

Massive organic waste stream coming our way

Our ears have been frantically to the ground over these last weeks, hoping to get wind of some free sources of organic matter for the soil-building which we need to get into in a big way if we want any kind of summer vegie garden this year.  Most sources of poo seem to be being sold rather than given away, and in the sorts of quantities we need the stuff in, it’s not going to be affordable for us to be buying poo by the bag.

Today, during the morning tea break between sessions at St James, we had a breakthrough courtesy of the lovely folks at the Lotus Eaters Cafe.  We, being us, chanced our collective arm, and are incredibly grateful that they’ve agreed that we can collect their green waste a few times a week.  We’re told that it’s a fair whack of waste, which is just what we had hoped to hear. All their food is organic, which means that we can trust their waste stream.  Incidentally, I understand that they have discovered this blog courtesy of a Google Alert which tells them whenever they’re mentioned anywhere on the web – cool trick, and if any of you Lotus Eaters folks are reading this: we love your work.

None of this, of course, solves the immediate problem of what to plant the summer veg into, but we’ll crack that soon, too – watch this space.